


Where You Lead, I Will Follow

by lolcat202



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Laura - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:48:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolcat202/pseuds/lolcat202
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura and Kara have a heart-to-heart. Pre-Daybreak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where You Lead, I Will Follow

Bill kept his chair close to her bed, close enough to reach out and touch her hand or run his fingers through her hair as he read. He would read until she slept, and most mornings, the empty chair would be no more than a fingertip away from her bed. On other mornings, it stood sentry duty against the demons that stalked Laura Roslin, and as much as she knew that Bill would jump in front of a bullet for her, she also knew that he’d never put that much distance between them while she still breathed. Someone was watching over her as she slept. She had always thought it was Lee who was her silent protector, but as Kara Thrace pulled the chair away from her bedside and positioned it at mouth of the curtains protecting her bed, she knew who’d kept watch, and wasn’t not surprised. She started this journey to a new beginning for mankind with Kara and a golden arrow, and it’s with Kara that she would finish it.

“Madam President, may I ask you something?” Laura smiled, the corners of her mouth curving up almost in reflex. A child in a classroom, eyes wide, trying to understand the lesson – Kara so reminded her of the teacher she used to be, and the students who struggled desperately to learn. Trying to make a connection between what she said and what was felt. “Of course you can.”

“Are you afraid to die?”

Well, wasn’t that the question. The day she watched her mother slip from this life, the answer was yes. The day of the Cylon attacks on the colonies, the day a man told her that she had cancer, the answer was yes. The day that she’d gasped for breath, believing that she’d failed in finding the path to Earth and begging Bill to be strong in terminating the half-Cylon baby, the answer was yes. Bill, bleeding out in the sickbay, yes. Waiting for Kara on Kobol, yes.Losing an election, yes. On New Caprica, yes. Billy, the boy she’d loved, the man she believed would lead the people she was going to leave, whether or not she wanted it. Yes, yes, yes, every waking moment was another choice she’d have to answer for, and yes, she feared death because she knew she’d have to look at every single person lost since that first day and answer for the decisions she’d made.

And she would, she was ready to answer for all of her crimes, until the day Bill Adama stepped out of that raptor. Until the day that she realized that the choices she made weren’t just for an ambigious, faceless _they_ , for a number on a whiteboard, but for the man who waited for her, alone, in the depths of space. In a way, it was the first time she didn’t fear death. In another, it gripped her with a terror that she’d never be able to block out, compartmentalize or rationalize. Fear of death was about not completing her mission until the second he kissed her tears away; after that, fear of death was about losing something that meant everything to her. Fear of death was fear of dying, bit by bit, while he sat by and died a little bit next to her every day. And yes, she was afraid of that, of finally finding someone who made her want to live, and sucking him down into the darkness with her.

“Yes, Kara. Yes, I am afraid to die.” Kara didn’t respond at first. She studied her knuckles, shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Took one breath and another before she could find the words. “It’s not that bad, you know. Dying. You’re here, and then you’re not.” Delivered in the petulant tone of a middle-schooler, right down to the twisting mouth and fidgeting fingers and legs.

Kara was giving the right answer, not the real answer, and the teacher that still lived somewhere in Laura Roslin couldn’t let it go. “Is that all there is, then?” she said in the same quiet voice she addressed the children in her classroom, children that ceased to exist years ago. Pose the question, and let them find the answers themselves. Children learned by doing, not by parroting.

“What else could there be?” Kara asked, and she _hmmmed_ in response. Noncommittal, just raising an eyebrow and waiting. She could wait better than anyone. Leave someone in silence long enough, and eventually they would try to fill the void. Her instincts may have been dulled by years of dust and corroding metal and politics, but they weren’t wrong. Kara shifted in hear seat again, studying a point on the wall just over Laura’s shoulder for a long minute before she finally answered. “You’re here, then you’re not, but then you are, and maybe you don’t know why. But you can’t leave. Not yet.”

She’d watched Kara for years, but this time she saw something she’d never seen before. No shouting, no punches thrown, no trying to bully the answers from a universe that had no intention of backing down. Kara was being honest. _She’s not a Cylon_ , Laura finally admitted to herself. She never was – brought back to life, but not regenerated. She was Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom. She was all the mysteries that Laura had struggled so long to understand. The dying leader would escort them to the promised land, but the scriptures had forgotten one important detail – the dying leader wouldn’t do it alone. Laura was the voice, Kara was the tool, and neither of them would survive it. One of them already hadn’t.

Laura had so many questions to ask, about death and regrets, but it seemed foolish and self-important to ask a dead woman half her age how she coped with it. How could she ask Kara to help her not regret the extra years she’d been granted, that time wasted that Kara would never see? And she was, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking the obvious question.

“Were you afraid to die, Starbuck?”

Kara’s face lit up, perhaps grateful for the first time that someone, anyone, had noticed that she was not skin and bone and rage anymore. That it should be Laura was more fitting; after all, who else in the fleet would ever believe something so crazy? _People keep saying that. It is crazy, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true._ “No, Madam President. I wasn’t afraid to die. A Viper pilot is already dead, every time they get into the cockpit.”

Laura had heard that before, in that ridiculous film that had seemed so important at the time. It seemed an overly simplistic answer then, and it seemed even more so now. “You had a life, Kara. You had a man you loved. You had two men you loved. And you’re telling me now that you didn’t care about leaving them behind?”

Kara shook her head, but Laura didn’t believe the quick response. Maybe it was the naivete of someone who hasn’t faced a slow, agonizing death? The belief that every year will be just as soft and easy (these years were neither soft nor easy), and the knowledge that no doctor will ever tell you that your breast is harboring an invader that will kill you, no matter what you do. Maybe nobody had ever told Kara how hard it would be to lose people again and again, to button up those emotions and keep doing the job. Then again, maybe not. Kara had lost Zak. Kara had lost her parents, long before she was ready to stop being a child. Maybe Captain Thrace had earned her stripes, after all.

Maybe Laura was the naïve one. Maybe, if she had accepted that she would die, she wouldn’t have been so afraid to truly live. Maybe she should have kept that single-minded pursuit of the promised land after finding a hollow shell of a radioactive planet, rather than second-guessing herself every moment after they’d found Earth. Maybe she should have trusted Kara more. Maybe she should have stopped hiding behind the words in her head every morning that she woke up, the echo that repeated You’re going to die, over and over again, until she could pull herself from the blankets and face the the precious hours of the day she should never have seen. _You’re here, then you’re not, but you still can’t leave_.

“Do you want to leave, Kara?”

Starbuck let out a little laugh at that, the same hollow laugh that echoed in Laura’s mind every time someone told her not to give up. Everyone but Bill – she couldn’t do that to him. He wanted so desperately to believe that she’d find another miracle, and as many times as she tried to tell him that he needed to accept that she would die, she couldn’t scold him for refusing to face it. _You’re here, then you’re not, but you still can’t leave_. She would have stayed with Bill until the end of time, if the Gods had given those immeasurable months, days, seconds back to her, but they weren’t her seconds anymore.

“Do you want to leave?” Pose the question and wait for the answer. Seconds ticked by, but she kept still. Kara had an answer, buried somewhere behind her bravado, and Laura could wait until the end of time to hear it. (She couldn’t, not really, but Kara Thrace had never let her down.)

“I want,” Kara said, and then trailed off .She stared, unfocused once again, at the military drab of the curtains surrounding the President’s bed. Gods knew she wouldn’t find the answers there; Laura had stared at them long enough over the last few days to be sure of that. “I want to complete the mission.”

“Me too.” The words slipped out before she could stop them. She’d been the dying leader for so long now, almost as long as she’d been president, far longer than she’d been Bill’s Laura. She couldn’t stop the pain that Bill would feel when she died, but she hoped with every fiber of strength that she had left that she could give this one last gift to the surviving people of the fleet, that she could stand on her own two feet and lead them to the land she was promised. She owed them that. The gods owed her that. She’d given up on it for a while, but now that every breath came with a struggle, she knew that she wanted her death to have meaning, her cancer to have a purpose. It was a selfish thought, and she recognized that, but she wanted it nonetheless.

Kara’s eyes focused once more on her face, and Laura could see the doubts and confusion clear just before she nodded, once, twice, and smiled that reckless smile that Bill so loved, in this child that was more him than either of his sons had ever been. “You will,” she said, and the confidence in her voice stopped Laura’s painful breathing in her throat. “You will, and I will, and all the promises we made will come to pass.”

“You’re very confident, Captain.”

“It’s easy to be confident when you have nothing left to lose,” Kara replied with a wry grin. “And that’s what we’re talking about now, Madam President. We have nothing left to lose.”

She thought of Bill, of him watching her die a little bit each day, of him wiping her forehead or sweeping her hair back as she threw up again and again. “There’s always something left to lose,” she said.

“What’s lost is gained again, a thousand times over,” Kara quoted from scripture. “You won’t lose him. You’ll never lose him.”

She would, though, and it wasn’t because of scripture, or fate, or destiny. She would lose him because she had cancer, because it came back after she tried to defy it, because she’d had more second chances than anyone could ever hope to ask for and the pragmatist in Laura Roslin knew, without a doubt, that it was long past her time to die. Still, she hoped that she’d find him again. Isn’t that what faith was? The unshakeable belief that the sins she’d committed against the fleet would be absolved, that Bill wouldn’t disintegrate under the crushing weight of her death, and the death of his ship? That when he finally boarded that boat, he’d look out to a far shore and see her there? She wasn’t sure if she believed in the gods anymore, or the scrolls, or any of the hollow words that led her to this point, but she did know that she believed in Bill, and that she’d fight tooth and nail to hold on to whatever ephemeral plane might grant her the smallest chance at eternity with him. “I’ll trust you on this, Captain,” she said softly. Isn't that what faith was? The unshakeable faith that this girl standing sentry over her mortal carcass believed, not in gods or scripture, but in the simple fact that love was stronger than death. Kara believed, so she believed as well.

Kara pulled her chair forward until it was next to the bed, until it had settled into the grooves that Laura could only imagine had been worn into the floor by Bill as he read to her, and she reached out to thread her fingers through Laura’s hand. “I’ll go with you,” she said, little more than a whisper. “When the time comes…well, Madam President, I don’t think I’ll have anywhere else I’ll need to be, so I’ll go with you. We’ll finish this together.”

Laura squeezed her hand, dry brittle skin surrounded by warmth and blood and sunlight and life. So much life. 

 _You’re afraid to die alone_. Not this time. “Thank you, Starbuck. I would very much like that.”

***

“You should go,” Kara whispered. Bill pulled back and cupped her face in his hands, then kissed her. She wanted to hold onto him, onto Lee, onto this new world that had so much promise, but she had so little time left. She had somewhere she needed to be, a promise she needed to keep, and she wasn’t going to break her word. Not this time.


End file.
